Tracy Alloway

Why am I recommending a book about cockroaches? Three words: KNOW YOUR ENEMY.

As a newish New Yorker living in a decidedly old New York apartment building, the occasional cucaracha sighting is an inevitable event. Reading The Cockroach Papers by Richard Schwied is therefore STEP ONE in an ongoing war against these hideous creatures and an experience that is surprisingly informative and, sometimes, even, enjoyable.

For instance, did you know the only food cockroaches won’t eat is cucumbers?

And they are surprisingly social:

Schweid writes, “cockroaches, while not social insects in the entomological sense of bees or ants with clearly assigned tasks that benefit the whole community, do clearly take pleasure in the company of other roaches, and the aggression pheromones draw them together, eliciting their effects regardless of the sex or age.” Cockroaches reared singly develop more slowly and take longer between molts than do those reared in a group. Although those groups can be too big “just as development is delayed in young cockroaches if they are isolated, over-crowding also extends the time between molts. So there is yet another kind of pheromone, called a “dispersal pheromone,” and it serves as the chemical signal that it is time to look for a new, slightly roomier harborage. This chemical is found in the insects’ saliva, and has just the opposite effect of the aggression attractant, in that it repulses cockroaches and causes them to look elsewhere for harborage.”

In true New Yorker fashion, I’ve put my hard copy of the book into storage so the above excerpt is borrowed from the excellent Farnam Street.